Green Lungs and Green Liberty: The Modern City Park and Public Health in an Urban Metabolic Landscape.

This paper explores processes of urban park creation from the mid-1800s to show how 'green lungs' and 'green liberty' shaped the health geography of the modern city. Tracking this story across a transatlantic canvas (using examples from London, Paris, New York and Montreal), it looks at how ideas around fresh air, exercise and greenery sat within municipal designs for a functional metabolic landscape, what I call somatic urbanism. Plotting the historical contours of the park as a landscape of health has two main uses.

Nudging hand hygiene compliance: a large-scale field experiment on hospital visitors.

Background: Hospital-care-associated infections (HCAIs) represent the most frequent adverse event during care delivery, affecting hundreds of millions of patients around the world. Implementing and ensuring conformity to standard precautions, particularly best hand hygiene practices, is regarded as one of the most important and cheapest strategies for preventing HCAIs. However, despite consistent efforts at increasing conformity to standard hand hygiene practices at hospitals, research has repeatedly documented low conformity levels amongst staff, patients and visitors alike.

London 1600-1800: communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice.

This essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court.

'Greenwich near London': the Royal Observatory and its London networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Built in Greenwich in 1675-1676, the Royal Observatory was situated outside the capital but was deeply enmeshed within its knowledge networks and communities of practice. Scholars have tended to focus on the links cultivated by the Astronomers Royal within scholarly communities in England and Europe but the observatory was also deeply reliant on and engaged with London's institutions and practical mathematical community. It was a royal foundation, situated within one government board, taking a leading role on another, and overseen by Visitors selected by the Royal Society of London.

Scales of Normality: Displays of Extreme Weight and Weight Loss in Blackpool 1920-1940.

Developments in scientific and medical understanding of disability, as well as an influx of war-disabled veterans in 1914, led to transforming societal attitudes towards those with physical deformities. Thus, scholars suggest that the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the sudden decline of freak shows as a popular form of entertainment. Whilst freak shows undeniably became less popular in metropolitan spaces such as London or Manchester, they thrived in seaside resorts; sites dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, pleasure and entertainment.

Framing the transit: expeditionary culture and identities in Lieutenant E.J.W. Noble's caricatures of the 1874 transit of Venus expedition to Honolulu.

Making use of a source previously unknown to historians, this article sheds new light on the British expedition to the Sandwich Islands to observe the 1874 transit of Venus. This source, a series of caricature drawings that follow the expedition from departure to return, gives insight into expeditionary culture and the experience of a previously unremarked member of this astronomical expedition, Evelyn J.W.

Contrasting Complement Control, Temporal Adjunct Control and Controlled Verbal Gerund Subjects in ASD: The Role of Contextual Cues in Reference Assignment.

This study examines two complex syntactic dependencies (complement control and sentence-final temporal adjunct control) and one pragmatic dependency (controlled verbal gerund subjects) in children with ASD. Sixteen high-functioning (HFA) children (aged 6-16) with a diagnosis of autism and no language impairment, matched on age, gender and non-verbal MA to one TD control group, and on age, gender and verbal MA to another TD control group, undertook three picture-selection tasks. Task 1 measured their base-line interpretations of the empty categories ().

A barrier to medical treatment? British medical practitioners, medical appliances and the patent controversy, 1870-1920.

From the late nineteenth century onwards there emerged an increasingly diverse response to escalating patenting activity. Inventors were generally supportive of legislation that made patenting more accessible, while others, especially manufacturers, saw patenting culture as an impediment. The medical profession claimed that patenting represented 'a barrier to medical treatment' and was thus detrimental to the nation's health, yet, as I argue, the profession's development of strict codes of conduct forbidding practitioners from patenting resulted in rebellion from some members, who increasingly sought protection for their inventions.

Context-driven expectations about focus alternatives.

What is conveyed by a sentence frequently depends not only on the descriptive content carried by its words, but also on implicit alternatives determined by the context of use. Four visual world eye-tracking experiments examined how alternatives are generated based on aspects of the discourse context and used in interpreting sentences containing the focus operators only and also. Experiment 1 builds on previous reading time studies showing that the interpretations of only sentences are constrained by alternatives explicitly mentioned in the preceding discourse, providing fine-grained time course information about the expectations triggered by only.

Pensions for 'cultivators of science'.

The occasional (and belated) concern of the British Government with science in the nineteenth century is a matter of potential interest to historians of science, yet many previous studies have tended to range over a variety of different aspects of the question. There have been too many vague allusions to financial support as 'money for science' in general. It is time that particular parts of the problem were unpacked.

"Living versus dead": The Pasteurian paradigm and imperial vaccine research.

The Semple antirabies vaccine was developed by David Semple in India in 1911. Semple introduced a peculiarly British approach within the Pasteurian tradition by using carbolized dead virus. This article studies this unique phase of vaccine research between 1910 and 1935 to show that in the debates and laboratory experiments around the potency and safety of vaccines, categories like "living" and "dead" were often used as ideological and moral denominations.

"Signs of the times": Medicine and nationhood in British India.

Medical practice and research in colonial India historically had been an imperial preserve, dominated by the elite members of the Indian Medical Service. This was contested from the 1900s on by the emerging Indian nationalism. This essay studies debates about the establishment of a medical research institution and how actors imposed the political identities of nationalism on British colonial practices of medical science.

Plastic body, permanent body: Czech representations of corporeality in the early twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, the body was seen as both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic entity. In the former case, its individual development, it was manifestly changeable, developing from embryo to maturity and thence to a state of decay. But in the latter case, concerning its development as a species, the question was an open one.

The French Academy of Sciences as a patron of the medical sciences in the early nineteenth century.

In the wake of the French Revolution, the newly founded First Class of the Institute in Paris was able to make major contributions, not only to science but also to medicine. Unfortunately, the latter has hardly been appreciated. These medical contributions may be summarized as being: (1) through the interests of two of its sections, (2) through patronage and, in particular, its exceptional encouragement of one young man, François Magendie, (3) through the Montyon legacy, (4) through its implicit recognition of pharmacy and pharmacology.

Reflections on a young offenders institution: communication--a need, a want, a right.

In this article, it is demonstrated that a dichotomy exists between wider societal movements to develop communication between individuals and among institutions and management practices within a young offenders institution. The principle aim of the article is to illustrate how young offenders are being systematically denied the opportunity to socially interact with others at an appropriate level. The significance of social exchange for these prisoners and how they achieve this is highlighted.

Early laboratories c.1600 - c.1800 and the location of experimental science.

Surprisingly little attention has been given hitherto to the definition of the laboratory. A space has to be specially adapted to deserve that title. It would be easy to assume that the two leading experimental sciences, physics and chemistry, have historically depended in a similar way on access to a laboratory.

Epilepsy and criminal law.

Automatic episodes of aggressive or violent behaviour may occur during or after an epileptic fit. Epileptic automatisms are regarded by the law as 'insane automatisms'. A person who commits a crime during the course of a seizure is therefore legally insane and must be committed to a psychiatric hospital.